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Bad decisions can often be traced back to the way the decisions were made-the alternatives were not clearly defined, the right information was not collected, the costs and benefits were not accurately weighed. But sometimes the fault lies not in the decision-making process but rather in the mind of the decision maker. The way the human brain works can sabotage the choices we make. In this article, first published in 1998, John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa examine eight psychological traps that can affect the way we make business decisions. The anchoring trap leads us to give disproportionate weight to the first information we receive. The status quo trap biases us toward maintaining the current situation-even when better alternatives exist. The sunk-cost trap inclines us to perpetuate the mistakes of the past. The confirming-evidence trap leads us to seek out information supporting an existing predilection and to discount opposing information. The framing trap occurs when we misstate a problem, undermining the entire decision-making process. The overconfidence trap makes us overestimate the accuracy of our forecasts. The prudence trap leads us to be overcautious when we make estimates about uncertain events. And the recallability trap prompts us to give undue weight to recent, dramatic events. The best way to avoid all the traps is awareness-forewarned is forearmed. But executives can also take other simple steps to protect themselves and their organizations from these mental lapses. The authors describe what managers can do to ensure that their important business decisions are sound and reliable.

This article offers insight to any decision maker struggling with a hard choice. Making wise trade-offs is one of the most important and difficult challenges in decision making. The sheer volume of trade-offs, however, is not what makes decision making so hard. It's the fact that each objective has its own basis of comparison, from precise numbers (34% versus 38%) to relationships (high versus low) to descriptive terms (red versus blue). You're not just trading off apples and oranges; you're trading off apples and oranges and elephants. How do you make trade-offs when comparing widely disparate things? In the past, decision makers have relied mostly on instinct, common sense, and guesswork. They've lacked a clear, rational, and easy-to-use trade-off methodology. To help fill that gap, Howard Raiffa, a professor emeritus at Harvard University, John Hammond, a Boston-area consultant, and Ralph Keeney, a professor of systems management at the University of Southern California have developed a system--which they call even swaps--that provides a practical way of making trade-offs among a range of objectives across a range of alternatives. The even-swap method will not make complex decisions easy; you'll still have to make hard choices about the values you set and the trades you make. What it does provide is a reliable mechanism for making trades and a coherent framework in which to make them.

A personal negotiation episode in purchasing a car is presented. Tactics and strategies commonly encountered by car buyers and car salespeople are illustrated.

A two-party, integrative, negotiation exercise involving several pre-specified issues to be resolved. Each party is given a pre-specified scoring system in monetary units. Side payments, within limits are possible. Face-to-face negotiations take place with no restrictive time limit. The negotiation is between Riverside Lumber Co., who is allegedly polluting the Blue River, and the Department of Environmental Conservation.